My property is around 12 miles from town, the first mile is unpaved, not maintained by the borough or the state.
We, the folks living along it plow,grade, fill potholes or hire someone to do so.
We had a friend who, often after a heavy snowfall, would drive his D8 Cat from his house 4 miles away and stop by for a beer. He'd have his blade down coming in and going out & our road was just a clear as the state maintained ones.
Let's see.. we've only been living here for 60 odd years and I'm sure sooner or later it'll never work.
Haha. Our road is a dead end. The community workers have filled the holes till the last through-street. This time they used asphalt. The former 3 or 4 times they used sand. Instead of holes, we now have some bumps of loose asphalt, that will stick to our tires due to the heat (90+). The main road was repaved last year. I thought they still had to do it but it was already done - just to tell how wonderful it is. Did I not read a few months ago, where an angry Englishman had filled the potholes and got arrested for it? I am not sure if the road would be better if the inhabitants had to pay for the repaving. Several of my neighbours are truckers and ruin the thin layer of glue that holds the rubble together.
I was driving from FL to NY. Partway into VA, I hit a road hazard that popped a back tire. I limped off the road and found a place to put on the spare. I stayed the night and in the morning had to limp on that spare donut (which was losing air itself) until I found a place in WV that had the correct tire. Dealt with that, got back on the road at noon, drove another nine hours or whatever, and when I was quite literally 90 seconds from my house, hit a pothole that could have swallowed an ocean liner.
And after I swore in shock and fury, my first thought was our subject here: Without government, who will fix the %&$#*@&# roads. Riiiiiiiight.
I am sure you could not laugh about it at the time, but it is hilarious afterwards. So sorry I laughed at your misery xxx I am sure you made it home though. At least our potholes here are not too big, but I cannot count the times I twitched my ancle on the loose gravel of our road walking the dog.
I like to write things so they’re funny. We have to keep laughing no matter what!
Sorry about your ankles. Do they make you pay to license your dog?
It took them months to fill in that pothole. It didn’t even have a cone or anything. You just had to know it’s there. And it’s not like we’re 20 miles down a country road here. This is in town.
Oh, and they leave roadkill lying around for weeks here. Deer with guts splayed out. What the hell are they even doing with all the insane tax money they collect?
No so far there is no dog licence fee. She walks right next to me, we are in a very short dead end, and she walks as if on a leash, she is that good.
We are 3 miles out of a very small town (about 2600 inhabitants) with mostly poor people, 60 % or so black. About 5 miles further is a 15 000 inhabitant town, that after 20 years or so finally had its roads repaved. Former mayor was real estate owner, don't know if Rep or Dem. Now they have a Dem but a nice person. I don't even know our own mayor LOL. I wonder how our little place survives. The next town over have huge city fees - we are county only out of the city limit and pay way less. I could not afford to live in the bigger town.
The ironic part of building this sausage is every supplier and contractor involved in building or rebuilding a road typically are privately owned companies. If you privatized roads, and I’ve seen these problems arise where people don’t want to pay to fix them, is you would need a way to collect funds for repairs. The only way I see is tolls paid for by people that use it. If a majority decides to not participate I have seen how raising funds can be an issue. Typically it gets paid for on the backs of the people with money that live on the street, not much different than the current system. The rich pay.
With transponder tech, paying for private roads would be easy peasy. The people who drive on them would pay, and the people who use them more would pay more. And it would all get standardized, just like it is now with EZpass, and just like all queen size beds and 2x4s are standardized. “Who would build the roads” is actually one of the easiest questions for a market anarchist to answer.
The roads are perfect example for how politicians think regardless where you live.. it was the same when I used to live in the Philippines 🇵🇭 till almost 22 years ago. There were roads that were built with long term use 60-70 years before but the new roads? Same thing happened as in here lol 😂 as long as there is no accountability whatsoever these guys will do whatever they want. Term limits are a good thing if it became the norm. That’s my two cents on the matter 😊
In the 1950's mainstream newspapers were reporting on the fact that all the major aerospace companies were working on anti gravity propulsion and that the age of the jet engine was nearly at an end. This was just reported as a fact (like "folding flat screens are only a few years away" - kind of thing).
Then at the start of the 1960's the topic completely fell off the radar never to be spoken of again. Within a few years reports of silent flying black triangles and other weird craft performing 'impossible' manoeuvres became common. Most of the sightings were on a Thursday. One engineer explained this as Mon-Wed = prep, Thu = test flight and Fri = debrief.
Meanwhile, the government announced 'Apollo' and the 'moon landings' to a public who were expecting a new Jetsons age. Apollo used 1940's rocket technology. The government has continued to rebrand this 1940's rocket technology as 'cutting edge' to each successive generation ever since. NASA is basically a PR department for 1940's rocket technology.
People often wonder why military planes always go over budget. One reason is the contractors charge thousands of dollars for widgets, and it is likely this overcharging is used to fund a parallel black program making next generation craft that the public never gets to see.
So thanks to statism, your tax dollars have been used to fund a 'breakaway civilisation' (a secret 'Jetsons world') for the elites. Meanwhile the public is kept dependent on oil, and driving about on potholed roads, instead of having anti gravity 'hover cars' and other technologies.
Only technologies of enslavement (wireless, smartphones, digital ID etc) are put into the public domain. Technologies of empowerment are kept hidden. Free energy technology is a similar story for anyone who wants to research it.
So asking who will fill in the potholes without government demonstrates a lack of imagination. Without government we'd all be using hover cars by now anyway. And each home would probably have some kind of free energy gizmo in the basement providing all the power without any monthly bills. Such a liberated and empowered population would be impossible to govern.
I think the answer is pretty simple. Let's have government for one purpose. To fix roads. That's it. The rest we the people will take care of. How can they finance it? With use fees. You use the roads you pay the fees. Whenever you purchase something that is utilized for transportation there si a fee that CANNOT be used for ANYTHING else but the roads. So when you buy your car, tires, repair parts, gasoline, oil...well you get the picture. The funds are used to fix and build roads. PERIOD. Some with other "government" functions. They could ALL be funded with use fees even though I'd prefer everything else to be privatized totally since that works the best. The best schools get the students and graduate the best of the best. You pay a USE fee for the school. You pay a USE fee for having fire protection. Privatize the police. It was done in the past, "Pinkerton's" comes to mind. And tyrannical PRIVATE police WILL NOT BE TOLERATED FOR ONE MINUTE. Just my 2 cents worth. And something to think about.
Before I became a full-blown anarchist, I had settled on some thing I was calling “roads minarchism.“ The idea behind it was that even if you were to have a bunch of private polities forming on their own property, you would still have the issue of travel between them—of inter-polity travel. And I wondered how that could be managed with equanimity without some central authority. In the time since, however, I have realized that roads ownership could be as decentralized and multifarious as governance. Some polities would control their own roads; roads corporations would arise that would facilitate inter polity travel; some polities would contract with roads owners, etc. Basically, the market would solve it just like it solves everything else.
But I do believe that what you are describing would certainly be a grand improvement over what we have now!
Or they could also charge by the mile using estimated use wear according to the automobile or truck you drive. Obviously a 2000 pound car is going to cause a lot less wear than a 200,000 pound truck. I suspect with the proper algorithm in a computer model they could determine the approximate wear on the roads over a period of time and you would pay a use fee based on that. So much per mile paid by the year. Someone who drives 50K a year would be causing more wear than someone driving 3K per year and so the use fee would be according to the miles driven. The trucks would be the highest since they literally tear the roads up due to their weight. I am sure something outside of the totally dysfunctional current system that would work much more efficiently.
With transponder tech, fully private road owners could use the same method. Charge by the mile, but also adjust depending on whether it’s a heavier vehicle or not.
The mob became the Givernment through the insurance industry. They turned protection money into “Insurance” made it required and we all have to pay for it if we want to live in the city.
“Nice shop you’ve got here. Lovely family. Tell ya what. We’re going to ‘secure’ your rights. We are going to protect you. And you are going to pay us for it.
“What’s that you say? You don’t want protection? You already have all your rights and don’t need us to secure them for you? Well geez, that’s too bad. It sure would be a shame if you refused to pay your taxes and we had to take your home and lock you up.
“What’s that you say? You’re not going to go quietly? Gee, that sure is a shame, since if you don’t, we will murder you.”
So many are just mind-controlled by Big Government, that they have all the solutions - the reality is they have virtually no solutions but to enslave, rob and often murder.
If my Appalachian neighbors were responsible for building and maintaining their own roads, they’d have invented a pourable road surface composite made out of refuse by now, that a meteor couldn’t pothole. By the time FEMA got there after Helene and started telling them no, they had already rebridged most of the creeks and were clearing the last of the collapsed cuttings.
In the mountains between Asheville and Knoxville, interstate 40 is still closed in both directions. Government half-measures keep washing out. This is a major freight artery between the seaboard and the Mississippi Basin. I81 and I85 are badly choked in compensation, not that either was designed for normal current loading.
I have heard that, too. I am not the young ace reporter for secret weapons development, but it feels like one of those stretchers designed to convince the average theory consumer that, as a class, theorizers are mouth-breathing dolts.
The commodification of attention has reached a saturation that makes my nescient grandparents' careful distinction between not caring and giving a matter no mind a critical skill.
I'm at the place in NC this week. Still have not found my dad's books.
I am reading "Lucifer's Hammer" right now, and I just got to the point where a scientist hid the books needed to rebuild civilization in an old septic tank. Did you check in there? 🤣
Allowing a company to fix the roads for profit could easily incentivise making the roads crappy.
Sure, you could argue that another company will offer to do a better job, but that's not what happens in reality.
Look at the Phoebus Cartel. They conspired to make all bulbs worse so they could all benefit from increased sales.
They could and did stop new businesses from emerging by a combination of methods including exclusive customer and supply contracts.
If you want good roads, the only method is for the road fixers to suffer somehow whenever potholes are discovered, and get rewarded whenever there aren't pot holes.
The pot holes will vanish and never return.
The same can be done with health.
Every time someone is sick, the health company has a penalty.
See how long it takes for them to stop poisoning people.
You need the people who use or benefit from those roads directly to know how to fix them or to know and trust someone who does, it's the only way to ensure they get fixed properly.
Even if they pay someone else to do it, they have more leverage if they know what it really requires and could get it done themselves.
Just like if you own a gold mine but don't know the gold is valuable or how to sell it, you'll get shafted.
Corporations are just fledgling governments.
The moment they have more power they will hire private security forces and become states.
The same for crime syndicates and religious organisations. Every powerful group that takes control has the potential to use that power to suppress rivals.
It isn't about what that organisation claims to be, but about what the people in charge of it are like and what they believe in.
The problem is not government itself, but any group that uses their power, wealth, or knowledge to oppress everyone else preventing them from accumulating power, wealth or knowledge.
That's why communism was a paradox. It claimed that the problem is that the wealthy are stealing from the poor and preventing them from gaining wealth.
It promised to solve this problem by stealing everyone's resources and making wealth illegal. Turning the entire population into penniless slaves with no freedom. It didn't remove wealth inequality it centralised all wealth into its own hands and then increased the oppression while calling it liberation.
Privatisation is neither good nor bad, it depends on the nature of the people in the corporation it ends up being managed by. If they are better people, then things will get better. Otherwise it is worse.
For example, imagine that a group of assassins manage to achieve a monopoly on law enforcement companies by killing all their rivals.
Can we really trust them to arrest themselves for their own crimes?
Or for a real life example, the India trading company which became the de facto controller of a nation. Can we trust them to offer a fair price and not form monopolies?
The ideal of coercion free informed choice is impossible, the reality is that the market place consists of fallible living people and its sentiment only reflects majority opinion.
It's capable of mass psychosis and delusion.
Anyway, to summarise, government authority is a delusion and a mass psychosis induced by compulsory education and fear of coercive force. It is just a group of people like any other.
Groups will always vye for power and there will always be some groups that are more powerful than others.
The best we can do is to prevent bad actors from rising to positions of power whether that's in governments, religions, or corporations.
And if we trust nobody, it is to work towards a world where nobody has more power than anyone else so everyone is busy fighting eachother such that they lack the strength to attack us.
In other words, the solution is to oppress everyone you don't trust. Exactly the same thing that everyone has always been doing since forever.
It's why ancaps want to oppress the government by privatising it into the hands of people or systems.
It's why left wing people want to oppress right wing talking points.
And its why communist governments carried on trading with other governments even though they banned their own people from doing so. And why stalin was paranoid and hated the public.
That is an astute description of a lot of real problems.
There are always going to be bad people, psychopaths, sociopaths, grifters, criminals, etc. etc. There is no ideal solution, but in my view, it is better to use market forces to keep it all restrained than to create a government that gives them inescapable, involuntary, irresistible power. Think of it, if you will, as bad vs. worse.
And not just that - I don't know about everyone else, but where I'm from (Northern WV), government also takes an eternity to fix the roads or even complete road projects.
Yes, because they have zero incentives. People can vote, but they cannot vote the system out of existence. Pols already know that the voters are basically impotent.
The NJ Turnpike is a perfect example of a privately owned road. The NJ Turnpike Authority is a quasi-governmental agency, authorized by the state, but not managed by it, therefore, it operates efficiently, even while being one of the busiest roads in the US. Construction rarely impedes traffic, and the tolls collected pay for NJSP patrols, repairs and new construction.
Naw, private roads will never work.
My property is around 12 miles from town, the first mile is unpaved, not maintained by the borough or the state.
We, the folks living along it plow,grade, fill potholes or hire someone to do so.
We had a friend who, often after a heavy snowfall, would drive his D8 Cat from his house 4 miles away and stop by for a beer. He'd have his blade down coming in and going out & our road was just a clear as the state maintained ones.
Let's see.. we've only been living here for 60 odd years and I'm sure sooner or later it'll never work.
I am sharing your delicious sarcasm 😁
Haha. Our road is a dead end. The community workers have filled the holes till the last through-street. This time they used asphalt. The former 3 or 4 times they used sand. Instead of holes, we now have some bumps of loose asphalt, that will stick to our tires due to the heat (90+). The main road was repaved last year. I thought they still had to do it but it was already done - just to tell how wonderful it is. Did I not read a few months ago, where an angry Englishman had filled the potholes and got arrested for it? I am not sure if the road would be better if the inhabitants had to pay for the repaving. Several of my neighbours are truckers and ruin the thin layer of glue that holds the rubble together.
But but but… you get to VOTE! Democracy is perfect; therefore, your roads are perfect. Any potholes you see are just an illusion…
until your head hits the top of the car and your tires go flat LOL
I was driving from FL to NY. Partway into VA, I hit a road hazard that popped a back tire. I limped off the road and found a place to put on the spare. I stayed the night and in the morning had to limp on that spare donut (which was losing air itself) until I found a place in WV that had the correct tire. Dealt with that, got back on the road at noon, drove another nine hours or whatever, and when I was quite literally 90 seconds from my house, hit a pothole that could have swallowed an ocean liner.
And after I swore in shock and fury, my first thought was our subject here: Without government, who will fix the %&$#*@&# roads. Riiiiiiiight.
I am sure you could not laugh about it at the time, but it is hilarious afterwards. So sorry I laughed at your misery xxx I am sure you made it home though. At least our potholes here are not too big, but I cannot count the times I twitched my ancle on the loose gravel of our road walking the dog.
I like to write things so they’re funny. We have to keep laughing no matter what!
Sorry about your ankles. Do they make you pay to license your dog?
It took them months to fill in that pothole. It didn’t even have a cone or anything. You just had to know it’s there. And it’s not like we’re 20 miles down a country road here. This is in town.
Oh, and they leave roadkill lying around for weeks here. Deer with guts splayed out. What the hell are they even doing with all the insane tax money they collect?
No so far there is no dog licence fee. She walks right next to me, we are in a very short dead end, and she walks as if on a leash, she is that good.
We are 3 miles out of a very small town (about 2600 inhabitants) with mostly poor people, 60 % or so black. About 5 miles further is a 15 000 inhabitant town, that after 20 years or so finally had its roads repaved. Former mayor was real estate owner, don't know if Rep or Dem. Now they have a Dem but a nice person. I don't even know our own mayor LOL. I wonder how our little place survives. The next town over have huge city fees - we are county only out of the city limit and pay way less. I could not afford to live in the bigger town.
The ironic part of building this sausage is every supplier and contractor involved in building or rebuilding a road typically are privately owned companies. If you privatized roads, and I’ve seen these problems arise where people don’t want to pay to fix them, is you would need a way to collect funds for repairs. The only way I see is tolls paid for by people that use it. If a majority decides to not participate I have seen how raising funds can be an issue. Typically it gets paid for on the backs of the people with money that live on the street, not much different than the current system. The rich pay.
With transponder tech, paying for private roads would be easy peasy. The people who drive on them would pay, and the people who use them more would pay more. And it would all get standardized, just like it is now with EZpass, and just like all queen size beds and 2x4s are standardized. “Who would build the roads” is actually one of the easiest questions for a market anarchist to answer.
I agree with you. I have an EZ Pass transponder. I had always paid cash. On a 2 hour trip with 3 tolls it cut 20 minutes off the trip.
That's why you buy a sticker each year for the old plate...
The roads are perfect example for how politicians think regardless where you live.. it was the same when I used to live in the Philippines 🇵🇭 till almost 22 years ago. There were roads that were built with long term use 60-70 years before but the new roads? Same thing happened as in here lol 😂 as long as there is no accountability whatsoever these guys will do whatever they want. Term limits are a good thing if it became the norm. That’s my two cents on the matter 😊
And the ultimate term limit is full market anarchism!
In the 1950's mainstream newspapers were reporting on the fact that all the major aerospace companies were working on anti gravity propulsion and that the age of the jet engine was nearly at an end. This was just reported as a fact (like "folding flat screens are only a few years away" - kind of thing).
Then at the start of the 1960's the topic completely fell off the radar never to be spoken of again. Within a few years reports of silent flying black triangles and other weird craft performing 'impossible' manoeuvres became common. Most of the sightings were on a Thursday. One engineer explained this as Mon-Wed = prep, Thu = test flight and Fri = debrief.
Meanwhile, the government announced 'Apollo' and the 'moon landings' to a public who were expecting a new Jetsons age. Apollo used 1940's rocket technology. The government has continued to rebrand this 1940's rocket technology as 'cutting edge' to each successive generation ever since. NASA is basically a PR department for 1940's rocket technology.
People often wonder why military planes always go over budget. One reason is the contractors charge thousands of dollars for widgets, and it is likely this overcharging is used to fund a parallel black program making next generation craft that the public never gets to see.
So thanks to statism, your tax dollars have been used to fund a 'breakaway civilisation' (a secret 'Jetsons world') for the elites. Meanwhile the public is kept dependent on oil, and driving about on potholed roads, instead of having anti gravity 'hover cars' and other technologies.
Only technologies of enslavement (wireless, smartphones, digital ID etc) are put into the public domain. Technologies of empowerment are kept hidden. Free energy technology is a similar story for anyone who wants to research it.
So asking who will fill in the potholes without government demonstrates a lack of imagination. Without government we'd all be using hover cars by now anyway. And each home would probably have some kind of free energy gizmo in the basement providing all the power without any monthly bills. Such a liberated and empowered population would be impossible to govern.
It certainly would not surprise me. Popular Mechanics was telling 1950s kids how to build flying saucers.
Have there been any leakers/whistleblowers over the decades?
I think the answer is pretty simple. Let's have government for one purpose. To fix roads. That's it. The rest we the people will take care of. How can they finance it? With use fees. You use the roads you pay the fees. Whenever you purchase something that is utilized for transportation there si a fee that CANNOT be used for ANYTHING else but the roads. So when you buy your car, tires, repair parts, gasoline, oil...well you get the picture. The funds are used to fix and build roads. PERIOD. Some with other "government" functions. They could ALL be funded with use fees even though I'd prefer everything else to be privatized totally since that works the best. The best schools get the students and graduate the best of the best. You pay a USE fee for the school. You pay a USE fee for having fire protection. Privatize the police. It was done in the past, "Pinkerton's" comes to mind. And tyrannical PRIVATE police WILL NOT BE TOLERATED FOR ONE MINUTE. Just my 2 cents worth. And something to think about.
Before I became a full-blown anarchist, I had settled on some thing I was calling “roads minarchism.“ The idea behind it was that even if you were to have a bunch of private polities forming on their own property, you would still have the issue of travel between them—of inter-polity travel. And I wondered how that could be managed with equanimity without some central authority. In the time since, however, I have realized that roads ownership could be as decentralized and multifarious as governance. Some polities would control their own roads; roads corporations would arise that would facilitate inter polity travel; some polities would contract with roads owners, etc. Basically, the market would solve it just like it solves everything else.
But I do believe that what you are describing would certainly be a grand improvement over what we have now!
Or they could also charge by the mile using estimated use wear according to the automobile or truck you drive. Obviously a 2000 pound car is going to cause a lot less wear than a 200,000 pound truck. I suspect with the proper algorithm in a computer model they could determine the approximate wear on the roads over a period of time and you would pay a use fee based on that. So much per mile paid by the year. Someone who drives 50K a year would be causing more wear than someone driving 3K per year and so the use fee would be according to the miles driven. The trucks would be the highest since they literally tear the roads up due to their weight. I am sure something outside of the totally dysfunctional current system that would work much more efficiently.
With transponder tech, fully private road owners could use the same method. Charge by the mile, but also adjust depending on whether it’s a heavier vehicle or not.
With government who will fix the roads?
🤣❤️🤣❤️🤣
Schools shut down as Lottery jackpots grow...
Yes, because it’s all a racket…
The mob became the Givernment through the insurance industry. They turned protection money into “Insurance” made it required and we all have to pay for it if we want to live in the city.
The government is the mob.
“Nice shop you’ve got here. Lovely family. Tell ya what. We’re going to ‘secure’ your rights. We are going to protect you. And you are going to pay us for it.
“What’s that you say? You don’t want protection? You already have all your rights and don’t need us to secure them for you? Well geez, that’s too bad. It sure would be a shame if you refused to pay your taxes and we had to take your home and lock you up.
“What’s that you say? You’re not going to go quietly? Gee, that sure is a shame, since if you don’t, we will murder you.”
THAT is government. Government is the mafia.
I always say that anything a private company can do, the government can do worse and more expensively.
You want grandma to starve and warlords to take over, don’t you…
So many are just mind-controlled by Big Government, that they have all the solutions - the reality is they have virtually no solutions but to enslave, rob and often murder.
💯
If my Appalachian neighbors were responsible for building and maintaining their own roads, they’d have invented a pourable road surface composite made out of refuse by now, that a meteor couldn’t pothole. By the time FEMA got there after Helene and started telling them no, they had already rebridged most of the creeks and were clearing the last of the collapsed cuttings.
Well said!
And presumably government is now claiming ownership of the bridges and taxing people for them.
In the mountains between Asheville and Knoxville, interstate 40 is still closed in both directions. Government half-measures keep washing out. This is a major freight artery between the seaboard and the Mississippi Basin. I81 and I85 are badly choked in compensation, not that either was designed for normal current loading.
I have heard it theorized that this hurricane was seeded and directed to this area intentionally…
I have heard that, too. I am not the young ace reporter for secret weapons development, but it feels like one of those stretchers designed to convince the average theory consumer that, as a class, theorizers are mouth-breathing dolts.
The commodification of attention has reached a saturation that makes my nescient grandparents' careful distinction between not caring and giving a matter no mind a critical skill.
I'm at the place in NC this week. Still have not found my dad's books.
I am reading "Lucifer's Hammer" right now, and I just got to the point where a scientist hid the books needed to rebuild civilization in an old septic tank. Did you check in there? 🤣
Pretty sure I'd remember hiding them in there.
or maybe we don't need as many roads as we think. The first great highway builder was a private...not public enterprise.
I think it was Hoppe who said that government initially built so many roads just so they could tax more easily.
haven't heard that one, but I like it.
Allowing a company to fix the roads for profit could easily incentivise making the roads crappy.
Sure, you could argue that another company will offer to do a better job, but that's not what happens in reality.
Look at the Phoebus Cartel. They conspired to make all bulbs worse so they could all benefit from increased sales.
They could and did stop new businesses from emerging by a combination of methods including exclusive customer and supply contracts.
If you want good roads, the only method is for the road fixers to suffer somehow whenever potholes are discovered, and get rewarded whenever there aren't pot holes.
The pot holes will vanish and never return.
The same can be done with health.
Every time someone is sick, the health company has a penalty.
See how long it takes for them to stop poisoning people.
You need the people who use or benefit from those roads directly to know how to fix them or to know and trust someone who does, it's the only way to ensure they get fixed properly.
Even if they pay someone else to do it, they have more leverage if they know what it really requires and could get it done themselves.
Just like if you own a gold mine but don't know the gold is valuable or how to sell it, you'll get shafted.
Corporations are just fledgling governments.
The moment they have more power they will hire private security forces and become states.
The same for crime syndicates and religious organisations. Every powerful group that takes control has the potential to use that power to suppress rivals.
It isn't about what that organisation claims to be, but about what the people in charge of it are like and what they believe in.
The problem is not government itself, but any group that uses their power, wealth, or knowledge to oppress everyone else preventing them from accumulating power, wealth or knowledge.
That's why communism was a paradox. It claimed that the problem is that the wealthy are stealing from the poor and preventing them from gaining wealth.
It promised to solve this problem by stealing everyone's resources and making wealth illegal. Turning the entire population into penniless slaves with no freedom. It didn't remove wealth inequality it centralised all wealth into its own hands and then increased the oppression while calling it liberation.
Privatisation is neither good nor bad, it depends on the nature of the people in the corporation it ends up being managed by. If they are better people, then things will get better. Otherwise it is worse.
For example, imagine that a group of assassins manage to achieve a monopoly on law enforcement companies by killing all their rivals.
Can we really trust them to arrest themselves for their own crimes?
Or for a real life example, the India trading company which became the de facto controller of a nation. Can we trust them to offer a fair price and not form monopolies?
The ideal of coercion free informed choice is impossible, the reality is that the market place consists of fallible living people and its sentiment only reflects majority opinion.
It's capable of mass psychosis and delusion.
Anyway, to summarise, government authority is a delusion and a mass psychosis induced by compulsory education and fear of coercive force. It is just a group of people like any other.
Groups will always vye for power and there will always be some groups that are more powerful than others.
The best we can do is to prevent bad actors from rising to positions of power whether that's in governments, religions, or corporations.
And if we trust nobody, it is to work towards a world where nobody has more power than anyone else so everyone is busy fighting eachother such that they lack the strength to attack us.
In other words, the solution is to oppress everyone you don't trust. Exactly the same thing that everyone has always been doing since forever.
It's why ancaps want to oppress the government by privatising it into the hands of people or systems.
It's why left wing people want to oppress right wing talking points.
And its why communist governments carried on trading with other governments even though they banned their own people from doing so. And why stalin was paranoid and hated the public.
They didn't trust them.
That is an astute description of a lot of real problems.
There are always going to be bad people, psychopaths, sociopaths, grifters, criminals, etc. etc. There is no ideal solution, but in my view, it is better to use market forces to keep it all restrained than to create a government that gives them inescapable, involuntary, irresistible power. Think of it, if you will, as bad vs. worse.
And not just that - I don't know about everyone else, but where I'm from (Northern WV), government also takes an eternity to fix the roads or even complete road projects.
Yes, because they have zero incentives. People can vote, but they cannot vote the system out of existence. Pols already know that the voters are basically impotent.
The NJ Turnpike is a perfect example of a privately owned road. The NJ Turnpike Authority is a quasi-governmental agency, authorized by the state, but not managed by it, therefore, it operates efficiently, even while being one of the busiest roads in the US. Construction rarely impedes traffic, and the tolls collected pay for NJSP patrols, repairs and new construction.
Interesting and helpful addition; thank you.
And I think it would be even more efficient if it had to face competition!
oddly, a mega-corp and some ancoms stepped up to the plate some years back.
Portland Anarchists Want to Fix Your Street's Potholes
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-15/portland-anarchist-road-care-fixes-potholes-anonymously
Domino's Is Fixing Potholes Because They're Ruining Pizza
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a21288286/dominos-potholes/
but, but, but muh roads...
https://thetruthaddict.substack.com/p/but-but-but-muh-roads
“Best we can do is make the roads gay” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣